How to film a car chase (on a limited budget)

How to film a short sequence of fast moving action and stunts

What do you consider when you film an action sequence? Before we get to the specifics of how to film a car chase, a few general principles for low budget action filmmaking:

• Safety first! Action sequences must never actually BE even remotely as dangerous when filming as they will ideally look in the finished movie.
• Slow is beautiful. The first step to film spectacular action on a limited budget is to take apart the action, and film each act slowly enough on set to make it very simple, uncomplicated, and only remotely dangerous if at all.
• Editing can greatly speed up the apparent pace of action in your finished film, and make it look at lot more spectacular.
• Multiple cameras can greatly increase the impact of an action sequence without increasing the complexity of the actions or stunts themselves.  It’s like painting the same scene, but with many more colors and brushes.
• Sound effects can negate the need to actually stage a gunshot, explosion, vehicle crash, or other expensive event.
• Computer effects, animation, and graphics also can reduce the need to actually stage an expensive event.

Whether you’re doing a relatively uncomplicated hand-to-hand fight scene or trying to film a complicated car chase with simulated explosions and crashes, here’s a place to go for inspiration. Watch a lot of Hitchcock films, which rely on suspense and imply much more violence than they show. And study the fight scenes in old B movies and westerns where actors pull their punches with sound effects added. Look for ideas for camera angles, how to manage the foley effects, how to make a fight look like a fight while also being quite safe on the set.

Here’s the mindset you want to have any time you’re filming action: how far can I pull my punches while still achieving my dramatic goals and delivering the spectacle? Can I introduce humor, animation, stylish panache, still images, or stylized production design choices which give me more leeway to be less violent, less realistic, and less expensive in the action spectacle?

Consider the olden days of silent film and musical theater. Elaborate, acrobatic, and difficult things were done in one take, borrowing from the days of vaudeville when such things were routinely done onstage with no second chances. You’ll notice in these old films that the director often simply sets the camera down or records the scene in very long takes. No editing at all. Or sparsely edited to give a feeling of motion through space, cover up a boo-boo, or whatever the director was going for with the cut.

Jackie Chan’s movies still contain these elements because he does his own stunts, borrowing from the same vaudeville tradition as those who inspired him.

However, that’s not how action sequences are done anymore, even by Chan. Today’s filmmakers rely on techie tools never imagined by silent movie directors.

The busier and more frenetically edited a piece is, the less coherent, complete, and fast the original actions taken on the set have to be.

A wide range of angles, closeups, perspectives on the action, and changing balance between camera motion and subject motion facilitates the frenetic editing. That large bucket of raw input (from as many camera vantage points as possible) gives you more choices to tell the story, as well as insurance if something goes wrong during filming and you don’t get your first-choice planned shots.

Scripting action sequences

Fights, swordplay, gun battles, chases of all sorts, and any sort of movie violence (staged or implied) ultimately rely on choreography.

Scripting these action sequences isn’t really about writing a screenplay. If anything, dialogue is the easy part.

Action sequences are planned and put together with shot by shot storyboarding, referenced by a shooting script that shows where the choreography and dialogue intersect. Multiple cameras are an insurance policy against things that go wrong, never a replacement for careful choreography and cameras-only rehearsal (before running the actual action).

The choreography is literal — first mastered by the actors in a gym or open space, then rehearsed on set, then mastered by the director with cameras added, then remastered in the editing suite. This is most obviously the case for hand-to-hand fighting–closest to the vaudeville origins of the form. But the same approach applies when developing any action sequence.

It has gone out of fashion to offer bird’s-eye views of what’s going on during an action sequence, and to place the camera/viewer up close to the participants. The effect is gritty, confused, disorienting. There’s an emotional impact to doing this. However, it makes narrative storytelling extremely difficult. I’m not personally a fan of this approach, as I’m fond of narrative.

Practical as well as artistic considerations actually work together here. A strong narrative element can help reduce the cost of filming an action sequence.

If the driving force behind your plot is simply spectacular action, that’s going to be expensive.

If the driving force of your plot is a series of humorous and/or gripping interactions between characters whose fates we care about and whose goals seem irreconcilably at odds, with a good dose of dramatic tension to tangle everything up, then special effects and production design can take a back seat. Action has another goal to serve other than eye candy. Action itself has good reason not to take over your film: it serves a strong master.

How to film a car chase:

If you have to show the chase car and what it’s pursuing in the same shot, in real time, with the skyline of a particular city in the background, you’re asking for budget.

Let’s think about other ways to film a car chase without breaking the financial and narrative balance of an independent, student, or experimental movie.

• Use what is being chased to tell the story. Don’t focus on the chase car. Use close up shots to focus on the person or creature running from the car. Or a pile of moving boxes and other miscellany that the car is going to run into. Or the driver of another car that’s being chased.
• Use who is doing the chasing to tell the story. Focus on close up shots that reveal emotions, motivation, thoughts, intentions, strategy of the pursuer. And/or what’s hindering the pursuer.  (And for that matter, the person(s) fleeing the pursuer.)
• Simplify the view you are presenting in each shot. Filming snippets of the sequence from the perspective of bystanders is easier, cheaper, and more coherent than filming from the perspective of a speeding car’s own dashboard or undercarriage. Telling a story with actors’ and actresses’ faces, however, is the least expensive option. Do more with dialogue and acting, and you’ll spend less overall.
• Choose your locations carefully. If you want to see people hanging out the windows of moving cars brandishing what appear to be guns, yelling at each other, that’s easier done in a parking lot or blind alley than an expressway. Expressways and highways can be simulated with closed off NASCAR racetracks–see what you can negotiate during the off season.

For safety’s sake, if your shooting script calls for stunt driving OF ANY KIND, hire a stunt driver and close off the area to other drivers while the sequence is being set up, filmed, and returned to normal.

And, if you want to film a car chase but are looking for a script, here’s my low budget car chase/action sequence short film script.